2020 Drastically Increased the Number of People on the Ontario Sunshine List

An analysis of Ontario Public Sector’s “Highest” Earners

Summary

The 2020 Ontario Sunshine List was released on March 19th 2021. It reported a total of 205,470 members, out of which 38,512 were new, or an increase of 23%.
While the list has expanded every year, this year’s growth was significantly larger than what the trend predicted.
Led by nurses and teachers, the higher-than-expected increase can be explained by a major compensation agreement in early 2020 and the government’s efforts to combat the pandemic.

This Report

What follows is a descriptive analysis of the Ontario Sunshine List. The main section is my attempt to shed some light on the effects of 2020 on Ontario’s high earners. Appendix A considers what would happen if the list’s cut-off salary was adjusted for inflation and Appendix B includes other descriptive statistics that were not relevant to the research question. The project is intended to be fully reproducible. If you’re interested in replicating or improving this analysis see the README file to get started.

What is the OSL

A sunshine list is the name commonly given to the public disclosure of employee compensation. In 1996, then premier Mike Harris, introduced the first Ontario Sunshine List, intending to disclose the salaries and benefits of all employees on the provincial government payroll who were considered high earners. Setting the floor at a salary of $100,000, the province reported 4,501 high earners that year, with an average salary of $121,495.2. Dictated by the Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act (1996), the government has required ever since that organizations that receive public funding from the Province of Ontario disclose by March 31 the names, positions, salaries and total taxable benefits of employees paid $100,000 or more in a calendar year.

Uninterrupted Growth

The number of people in the Ontario Sunshine List has increased with every release since its conception 25 years ago. It was twice as big by 2000, ten times by 2008, and today the list is 45 times larger than in 1996. Regardless, the yearly average earnings have remained mostly constant around $127,372, likely because increasing existing salaries are compensated by new additions to the list, most of which earn a salary close to the floor.

Long Summary

Recorded by Government Sector

The data provided is categorized by government sector. While these sectors change slightly year-to-year as a result of administrative changes and operational restructuring (See Appendix B for a full list), we can functionally group all employees reported in 9 independent sectors. The following figure shows the number of people in the list through time divided by sector.

While the size of sectors vary, Municipalities, School Boards, Hospitals, and Universities, have captured the lion share of high earners for most of the lists existence.

Long Summary by Sector

2020 in Review

The last release of the OSL reported an increase in members by a total of 38,512 members and a reduction in the average salary of $1,523.196.

Municipalities, School-Boards and Hospitals

Municipalities, School-Boards, and Hospitals, top the share of high earners in 2020 by a significant margin, making-up almost two thirds of the total.

Waffle Chart of OLS 2020

Municipalities

Police constables ($118k), managers ($129), and firefighters ($117k), made up almost a third of the job titles in Municipalities in 2020.
The average salary was $123,291.5. The highest paid positions were Chief of Police ($481k), Chief of Police ($436k), and City Planner ($387k).

All sectors saw the number of people making over $100k increase, but it was School Boards and Hospitals that saw the biggest change.

School Boards

Teachers ($103k) dominated the School Board sector in 2020, making up 97% of jobs in the list.
The average salary was $109,083.8. The highest paid positions were Legal Counsel ($382k), Director ($334k), and Director ($316k).

Hospitals

The list was topped by Nurses ($110k), followed by Managers ($116) , and Directors ($148k)
The average salary was $120,083.3. The highest paid positions were President and CEO ($845k), President and CEO ($776k), and President and CEO ($733k).

Percent Change in Quantity

Job Titles

Teachers and nurses were by far the most popular jobs in the Ontario Sunshine List of 2020. The best paying jobs in contrast went mostly to Ontario Power Sector with President and CEO ($1.22M), President Nuclear ($1.13M), and CEO/Chief Nuclear Officer ($901k) as the top 3.

Top 5 Job Titles

Modeling Growth

Using a generalized additive model (GAM) with a Poisson distribution, I forecast what growth in the list could have looked like if the number of people in the list increased according to the observed trend leading to 2020.

Overall growth higher than expected

This model concludes that the increase in the number of people in the OSL in 2020 was much higher than expected. While it predicted that only 175,511 public sector workers would earn more than $100k, or an increase of 18%. Instead, the list featured 205,470 members (23%), surpassing expectations by 29,959 employees.

Predicted values

This fact alone may raise some eyebrows but it is important to investigate the sources of such increase before reaching any conclusions.

The Culprits

We can apply the same technique for individual sectors in the list. This allows us to identify the individual impact of 2020 on each sector and attempt to determine where the above-expectations growth is coming from.

Predicted values by sector

While earlier we learned that municipalities make up the largest share of the list and saw one of the biggest increases of 2020, we can see that its count is mostly in line with our model’s predictions. Instead, when accounting for the expected trend, Crown Agencies join School Boards and Hospitals, in the list of sectors which growth exceeded expectations.

Crown Agencies

While Crown Agencies make a smaller share of the list, its higher-than-predicted growth warrants a closer look.

The model predicted 8,351 members but the data reported 9,332 - a difference of 981
About 40% of the growth can be explained by increases in Managers, Case Managers, and Specialist, return to work program.
The difference is likely a result of the various agencies’ efforts to operate during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- The government has engaged on several rounds of hiring surges of Case Managers and Contact Tracers intending to “to help track, trace and isolate new cases of COVID-19”. By January 2021, the government reported 5,600 case and contact tracers in the province.
- Specialist, return to work program, are employees in Ontario’s Workplace Safety & Insurance Board that are tasked with helping injured workers that have had difficulties returning to work.
- While I found no evidence to confirm this, I presume part of the increase in Managers and Specialists, happened because of a need for increased logistics and planning, and the hazardous nature of the pandemic on workplaces, respectively.

Crown Job Change

School Boards

The model predicted 34,019 members but the data reported 43,805 - a difference of 9,786
Virtually all growth came from Teachers new to the list (a shocking ~40% of the total increase in 2020).
As front-line workers, teachers in Ontario have been fully exposed to the dangers and impacts of the pandemic. While increased working hours from the pandemic help explain this growth, it was a major compensation agreement in early 2020 that was likely the main source.
- The 2019-2020 school year was a contract negotiation year for all unionized workers in School Boards in Ontario. The government ratified agreements with the various teacher unions throughout spring of 2020.
- The collective agreements included raises in compensation and benefits (given retroactively) and were negotiated with all five relevant teacher boards Ontario Council of Educational Workers (OCEW), (Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), Education Workers’ Alliance of Ontario (EWAO), Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association (OECTA), and the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO).
- Apart from the raise, it is likely that overtime and teachers filling in in administrative positions also contributed to the increase in teachers in the 2020 OSL. Also notable, the pandemic led to a significant rise in the number of social workers (in all three sectors).

School Job Change

Hospitals

The model predicted 26,312 members but the data reported 33,928 - a difference of 7,616
Similar to School Boards, the distribution of job titles in Hospitals and Boards of Public Health is skewed towards one profession. Nurses made up more than 90% of the sector increase in 2020 and almost a quarter of the total growth.
The provincial government has been expanding their nurse staff since mid 2020. Alongside it, a pandemic pay bump applied to health care workers in the fall, as well as overtime hours in dealing with the pandemic explain the drastic increase.
Also notable, we saw in increase in social workers similar than the one seen in School Boards and, in line with the health implications of COVID-19, we see the number of Respiratory Therapists on the list increase by 300%.

Hosp Job Change

Conclusion

There is only so much we can extrapolate from this limited information. While we can conclude that the increase observed was higher than normal, and this was due to very large increases in the number of teachers and nurses, it is impossible to determine whether the decisions behind such changes were appropriate, successful, or efficient.

Many argue that the list’s floor should be raised according to inflation (see Appendix A), whereas other countries like Norway have opted for full transparency in the public sector. It is clear that the cut-off, as it exists now, does more to confuse than clarify. $100k dollars, while far from the median ($37,500 as of 2019), covers too broad of a stroke to facilitate insights on the highest earners, but too narrow to attempt to investigate broad changes in the public sector. In fact, most of the reporting that follows the list’s release, focuses seldomly on the individuals earning the highest salaries. This is important information, but one that fails to give us any valuable big-picture insights.

Further analysis on the OSL is welcomed, with interesting research questions like contrasting trends through time with electoral cycles or economic fluctuations. Earnings trends across sectors and job titles, could also reach useful insights about the income distribution of Ontario’s public sector.